This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. This was my second Mother’s Day as a mother, and my fourth as a motherless daughter. I spent the day ricocheting between joy and gratitude and despair and loneliness. And that night, after my son was in bed and I was free to give in to the despair, at least a little bit, I opened Facebook and noticed a post on my wall from the William Maxwell FB page. (I always feel an urge to chuckle when I see a missive from the WM people — what on earth would he have thought about this medium, anyway? And if there are so many people out there who love WM, how come I’ve only met a few of them?)

Anyway, this was the post:

Mother’s Day thoughts from William Maxwell: “When the novelist William Maxwell was 10 years old, his mother died during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Maxwell wrote, “It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it … the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away.” He later said that every book he wrote was an attempt to capture that experience. He was once asked in an interview what he would say to his mother if he could talk to her. He replied, “I would say, ‘Here are these beautiful books that I made for you.’”

Reading this the first time, my heart raced a little.

Which got me thinking: am I doing this for my mother? Novel #2 has a narrator with a dead mother — but the narrator is not me, and the dead mother is not my dead mother. Surely if I were doing this for her, I would have finished the first one before she died, wouldn’t I have? She really would have liked that.

But: to my mother, there was no better occupation (or preoccupation) for me than writing. She was one of these would-be writers, herself. A person who thinks a lot and reads a lot and listens and intuits and tells stories — but never had the confidence to sit down and do it, start to finish. I am only barely, a generation later, a person who can do it. Or rather, I jump in and out of being that person as if fleeing an inhospitable environment.

STILTSVILLE is dedicated to my mother and my father. Each of them is responsible for the book in a very real way, and they are partially responsible for whatever comes next. Support comes in a lot of forms, but to give someone the implicit, unflinching approval that what they are doing is worthwhile, even fantastic — that is a great gift. Both my parents gave this to me, without the slightest hesitation, always. (When I accepted a new teaching job a few years back, I called expecting them to be pleased, but instead they both said, “But when will you have time to write?” They were right, of course — not until the teaching went did the writing come.)

This is the gift I hope to give to my son. My husband is a loving and generous man and a wonderful father — but he’s of pragmatic, Midwestern stock, and I think that if our son chooses to spend his life in pursuit of something as elusive, complicated, and self-propelled as writing (or painting, or acting, or any other creative pursuit), it will be me, his mother, who will give that implicit, unflinching approval. Maybe I am — or should be — writing for him. So that someday he can look at me and say, My mother did what she wanted to do with her life. It wasn’t easy or simple or consistent or secure, but she did it, and I can do it, too.

–Sd